YouTube took down 58 million violative videos last quarter

The majority of the removed videos received little to no views, according to YouTube

YouTube has announced that it removed 58 million videos and 224 million comments from its site in the third quarter of 2018.

In a blog post, the video-sharing company noted that “the majority of removals were for spam,” with the total number of removals representing “a fraction of the billions of comments posted on YouTube each quarter.”

Because so many videos are uploaded to YouTube on a daily basis, the company says the majority (81 percent) of violative videos are first detected by machines. According to YouTube, 74.5 percent of the videos discovered by machines had never received a single view.

In September specifically, YouTube says 90 percent of the nearly 10,400 videos removed for violent extremism or 279,600 videos removed for child sexual abuse received fewer than 10 views.

Despite significant video and comment removal, though, YouTube says daily users are 11 percent more likely to comment in 2018 than they were last year.

“We are committed to making sure that YouTube remains a vibrant community, where creativity flourishes, independent creators make their living, and people connect worldwide over shared passions and interests,” the company wrote in the blog post.

“That means we will be unwavering in our fight against bad actors on our platform and our efforts to remove egregious content before it is viewed. We know there is more work to do and we are continuing to invest in people and technology to remove violative content quickly. We look forward to providing you with more updates.”